Watergate… Obama Style

In 1972 Watergate, one of the biggest scandals in American political history hit Washington.

President Nixon had ordered wiretapping of his political opponents, for what turned out to be purely political reasons. His operatives, who weren’t government employees were caught, and accused the president as part of a plea bargain.

The result of this boondoggle was Richard Nixon resigning from the presidency, in order to avoid being the second president to be impeached.

Of course, the media had a real hay day with Nixon’s scandal, giving birth to what then became known as “investigative journalism.”

Every reporter who graduated from college wanted to be the next one to break the story on a major scandal. For a few decades our politicians had to walk a narrow line, keeping any unsavory activities from coming to the attention of the media.

But the times, as they say, have changed. Today’s media is mostly part of the progressive-liberal movement, pushing our nation’s politics more and more into socialism and a one-world government.

As such, they’ve become the de facto propaganda arm of the Democrat Party, even if they aren’t listed as the propaganda arm de jure.

Mainstream Media and the Progressives

The mainstream media sees it as their job to help progressives accomplish their agenda. As such, they are probably the group most responsible for dividing the nation. Rather than being the conveyors of truth and information that they used to be, they have redefined “truth” to mean the liberal agenda and anything that doesn’t agree with it as being “fake news.”

They’ve done this on climate change, they did it during Obama’s presidency, they did it during the 2016 elections and now they’re working overtime to do it in Trump’s presidency.

There are two ways in which the mainstream media lies to us. The first is by telling us an untruth; something they have made up or which they are party to someone else making up. Such has been the case of their reporting of mass shootings. Every time there is a mass shooting, they immediately begin the narrative of how some nut-job conservative went nuts again. Yet once the facts come out, it is found that it was a liberal who pulled the trigger.

Of course, this goes far beyond gun control, hitting every area that affects our nation. One of their favorite weapons is the classic liberal weapon of name calling.

Throughout the presidential campaign, they characterized Donald Trump as a racist, sexist, homophobe, islamophobe who was going to take the rights away from women, minorities and the LGBT community.

The other way they lie to us is by concealing the truth. They focus huge amounts of airtime on outrageous stories that really don’t matter, in order to hide what’s really going on. During Obama’s tenure, this would most likely be hiding something bad that Obama was doing, in which case they were protecting Obama.

Now that Trump is in office, they are making sure not to report anything good that is happening, so that they can avoid having anything to do with making Trump look good.

So now we have the latest chapter in the story of media misreporting. On one side, they’ve been hammering the fake news story of Trump’s supposed ties to Russia, while ignoring Hillary Clinton’s very clear ties to them.

The Russian Story

The whole Russian story started out of two things. Trump made a joking comment in one of his campaign speeches, asking the Russians to release Hillary’s 30,000 missing e-mails, if they had them. Shortly thereafter, Wikileaks started posting Hillary’s e-mails, as well as those of her campaign manager and top Democrat Party officials.

Those e-mails gave us a true and accurate picture of the inner workings of the Democrat Party, showing the corruption that is a daily part of Democrat political life. Yet somehow, that story never really broke. The e-mails are still sitting there, but nobody is really talking about them. In this case, nobody includes the main conservative news sites too.

The second root goes back to the Cold War. For decades, starting just after the end of World War II, the Russians were the bogeymen of the world. Countless books and movies portrayed them as the bad guys.

While that image has faded some, Vladimir Putin’s charming way of threatening his neighbors, such as attacking Ukraine and taking back the Crimea, has brought the bogeyman image back out of the closet. Coupled with Trump’s statement about the Russians, the media had their story and they ran with it.

For almost a year now, we’ve been being told by the mainstream media that Trump was in collusion with the Russian bogeyman. That escalated with the various Wikileaks dumps, increased as the campaign drew near and went right over the top with Trump’s win.

Since the election, the progressive-liberal left, along with their media lapdogs, have been pushing the narrative that the Russians hacked the election, all to spoil Hillary’s campaign and allow their best friend, Donald Trump, to win the election.

Let’s get a couple of things straight here.

First of all, Trump isn’t best buddies with Putin. About the closest thing he’s said that even sounds anything like that was that he wanted to work together with Russia for world peace. That’s something he should have said. Two of the world’s most powerful countries should work together for peace, as well as for defeating terrorism. As president, if he refused to speak with them, he would be remiss in his duties.

Secondly, Julian Assange, the editor-in-chief of Wikileaks, has come out clearly stating that the e-mails that were posted on his organization’s website didn’t come from the Russians, but rather from leaks in the Clinton campaign office and the offices of the Democrat Party.

So, it’s clear that what the Democrats are claiming didn’t happen. Even so, Democrats are sticking to their story, refusing to accept that Trump won the election honestly.

But the narrative that Democrats are pushing is much more sinister than the reality would be, even if the reality they claim were true. By saying that the Russian’s “hacked the election,” they’re clearly implying that the Russians somehow changed the outcome of the elections by getting into the election computers. In other words, the implication they are pushing is that the Russians committed voter fraud, even though they didn’t.

This is a tricky bit of misinformation that the Democrats and their medial allies are pushing. Their only factual point of reference is the e-mails that were given to Wikileaks. So the claim is that Russia hacked into the necessary computers to gain access to those e-mails and then turned them over to Wikileaks.

The way they are stating the story makes it out to be a much bigger and more nefarious Russian involvement than that.

Even if the Russians did what the Democrats claim they did, all they would be doing is exposing the Democrat’s own words. Why should they be bothered by that? They love to jump on Republican words and twist them out of recognition in an effort to make the speaker out to be bad.

But nobody has changed one word of their own e-mails, just laid them out for all to see.

Everything Changed on March 4th

On March 4th Trump tweeted that Obama had wiretapped his phone lines. No longer could the media run around slandering Donald Trump, they had to circle their wagons and protect Obama. Their fair-haired boy was in trouble and so they rushed to his defense.

I’ll have to say, this was a masterful tweet by Trump. In one short message, he changed the entire narrative, putting his enemies on the defense. If one was writing a book on warfare, this could serve as a prime example of taking the initiative away from the enemy.

Obama’s spokesperson quickly came out with a response, saying that Obama didn’t wiretap Trump’s phone lines, nor did anyone else in the White House. It was the standard denial one would expect, but masterfully written nonetheless. Without denying that the event had happened, he declared before America and the world, that Trump was lying. It was the classic effective lie, one with just enough truth in it, so as to seem truthful.

But while Obama and the White House didn’t actually attach wires to Trump’s phone lines, it’s clear that someone had been listening in on Trump’s team, specifically listening in on conversations between Trump team members and people who were in the employ of the Russians.

Herein is something else I need to clarify. The term “wiretapping” has changed through the years. Originally, it referred to physical wires, attached to physical phone lines, allowing others to listen in on what were supposed to be private conversations.

But things have changed. Our technology has increased by several orders of magnitude since that time. So today, wiretapping doesn’t mean the same thing that it did back then. Today, if the FBI or some other law-enforcement agency wants to listen in on those conversations, and can get a warrant allowing them to do so, it’s all handled at the phone company.

Of course, they could just go to the NSA, who records every bit of electronic communications in the world. But for some reason, the FBI doesn’t do that. Instead, they go to the FISA court for a warrant and then do the wiretap themselves, probably with the aid of the local phone company.

That’s what happened in Trump Tower. The FBI first went to the FISA Court for a warrant, naming four members of Trump’s team. That warrant was rightly denied. So they went back with a fresh request, leaving the names of Trump’s team members off the request. That time the court granted them the warrant, as there was no reason not to do so.

So, the electronic surveillance in Trump towers was at least marginally legal. The pretext involved a Russian bank, which had offices in the tower. Whether or not their lines were actually wiretapped is irrelevant, it seems that they weren’t the real target anyway. The target was team Trump.

Up to this point, everything the FBI did was legal. They were following orders given to them by superior authority. They got the warrant they needed, to make their actions legal. It’s what happened after that which became illegal.

On January 12th, Obama issued Executive Order 12333, which amongst other things, changed the dissemination of intelligence information containing the names of American citizens. Before that, the names of Americans had to be eliminated in intelligence information, before it was disseminated.

The new E.O. which came out the month before Obama’s term ended, allows dissemination of American names picked up in electronic surveillance to be shared with all 16 intelligence agencies.

What that means is that if we assume that the FBI followed the law and only wiretapped the Russian bank that they got the warrant to surveil, picking up the names or the voices of Trump team members was merely incidental. In other words, it wasn’t part of their investigation. Yet that information, which could be highly damaging to the Americans in question, was widely disseminated throughout our nation’s intelligence agencies.

Chances are extremely high that the information made its way into the hands of at least a few Obama supporters; either people who were his political appointees or simply Democrats who voted for him. Either way, it made it into the hands of people who had the ability and the opportunity to use it for political purposes, rather than what it was supposed to be for.

And so, information about conversations between Trump team members and Russians made it into the hands of the Democrat’s lapdogs, the mainstream media. They reported gleefully about Trump’s ties to Russia and more specifically about his National Security Advisor, General Flynn, having lied to Congress about his contacts with Russians. Their source for all these accusations? An anonymous source. Not exactly the most reliable source to use, I’d say.

Of course, the media is now denying that they got any classified information from the intelligence community, even though they themselves reported that they did, just a few months ago. Not only that, but they reported that they knew that Obama’s administration had spied on Trump. They themselves made the case to back up what Trump said in his Twitter post of March 4th.

Here is where we find the true scandal. Whoever gave that information to the media, broke the law. While we can’t at this time say that they did so at the orders of the former president, they certainly did so to please him.

Whether Obama himself knew that it was done or whether he said it should be done is something we will probably never know. But it was clearly done for his benefit, not for Trump’s.

For that matter, it wasn’t done for the benefit of the country. If anything, it was done to harm the country, more than just to harm Trump and his team. At a minimum, that borders on treason, if it can’t be proven to truly be a treasonous act.

If we ever needed proof of the corruption in the Democrat Party and in Obama’s Administration, we now have it. The question is, what is going to be done about it?